An Application of ‘Jigsaw Learning’ to Teaching Infrastructure Model Development

Abstract

SUMMARY Skills in group communication, development of problem definition and coordination of activities are essential in modern day multi-disciplinary engineering. The development of these skills requires more than just being told they exist and how the students should acquire them. Students must be exposed to these situations and taught how to handle them. This paper presents a study of a teaching technique that would encourage the development of communication skills between students: ‘jigsaw learning’. The approach consists of dividing students solving a particular problem into a number of groups. A student is first placed into an overall model development group to specify the problem to be solved. Second, he/she works in the component group to create a particular model component. Finally, once the component is developed the student moves back to the original model development group and incorporates the specific component into the overall model. In order to do this successfully, students must communicate the general description of the model to the component group, who share similar expertise. They must then communicate the findings of this expert group back to a more disparate model development group. Each student moves through the steps of: specifying the problem; specifying and considering connections between the components; developing the components; bringing them together; and presenting the results. To assess the success of the approach, a series of studies were carried out by the Higher Education Research Unit. Two questionnaires were distributed. They indicated the approach was successful but refinement was necessary.